Edward Wilson believed in America, and he would sacrifice everything he loved to protect it.

The true story of the birth of the CIA through the eyes of a man who never existed.

The untold story of the most powerful covert agency in the world.

All our dirty secrets start here.

Who is the good shepherd? The one who looks after his family or the one who looks after his country?

“The Good Shepherd,”,Review

“The Good Shepherd,” a chilly film about a spy trapped in the cold of his own heart, seeks to put a tragic human face on the Central Intelligence Agency, namely that of Matt Damon. The story more or less begins and ends at the Bay of Pigs. In between there is a spicy, lively interlude in the 1930’s at Yale University, where little boys are made of skull and bones and secret societies. Yale leads to World War II, cloak and dagger and a British spy cut from the same bespoke cloth as Kim Philby. Then it’s over to Washington, where the citadels of power loom against the cheerless sky like tombstones.

Mr. De Niro does fine in his avuncular role and, in the main, even better as the film’s director. He imbues “The Good Shepherd” with a funereal vibe that works especially well on the dark, dank streets of London, where Wilson learns his first repellent lesson in spy-catching, and during his early years in Washington. Among the film’s most striking visual tropes is the image of Wilson simply going to work in the capital alongside other similarly dressed men, a spectral army clutching briefcases and silently marching to uncertain victory. In silhouette the men recall the gangsters in a Jean-Pierre Melville film, even as their anonymity evokes the drones in Madeleine L’Engle’s book “A Wrinkle in Time” who are ruled by an evil disembodied brain called IT.